The present invention relates generally to the field of databases, and more particularly to database query processing.
A challenge of modern database management is the amount of data which has to be processed per every database query. One approach for limiting resource consumption and the amount of input/output operations on discs is to introduce low-level statistics for the data in the database. In this approach, some basic statistics are kept for small datasets of data. For example for each dataset, the minimum and the maximum value of the entries of a particular column are determined. If a query asks about data which is determined not to be within the range given by the minimum and maximum value of the column, the respective column will not be read from the disc at all, as the searched data cannot be found in this column.